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8E RM O N 



PEEACHED IN THE 



WiNTHEOP Church, Charlestown, 



JUNE 18, 1865. 



JEREMIAH EAMES RANKIN. 

PASTOR. 







'^' 




BOSTON: 
PUBLISHED BY MOSES H. SARGENT, 

No. 13 CORNHILL. 

18 65. 



^D 






Dakih awd Metcalf. 



THE YOUNG MEN 

of the 
BT WHOSE REQUEST IT IS PUDLISHED, 

THIS SEEMON 

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 



^niBsm ip^s^em 



WITH THB PE\TEU THAT THET MAT BE A8 FAITHFUL TO TDK CIVIL AND 

EEUalOUS LIBERTIES OF THE COUNTRY AS HAVB 

BEEN THEIR FATHERS. 



SERM.ON. 



Josh. iv. 6, 7. " When your childeen ask their fathers, in time to come, 
What mean ye by these stones, Then ye shall answer them, These stones 
shall be a memorial unto the children of Israel forever." 



The event here to be commemorated was a miracle. 
When the feet of the priests that bore the ark of 
the Lord, the vanguard of God's advancing hosts, 
but touched the, edge of. the Jordan, its tides, roll- 
ing on in their harvest fulness, were instantane- 
ously stayed, and piled up in one overhanging but 
harmless volume, while the children of Israel passed 
over to the other side. The memory of this inter- 
position was, by divine direction, to be transmitted 
to future generations by the erection of a monu- 
ment at the first resting-place beyond the river. 
Twelve stones, corresponding to the twelve tribes 
of Israel, and taken from the bed of the Jordan, 
where the feet of the priests had been firmly 
planted, were to be heaped one upon another as 
a memorial ; and, in "lieu of inscriptions, the whole 
Hebrew nation was to stand as an interpreter of 
ils design to the latest posterity. When their chil- 



dren inquired the meaning of this memorial, they 
were to reply : These are the rocks made sacred 
by the feet of your* fathers, when they stood be- 
.tween the divided river ; and this is the spot 
where they first encamped after entering upon the 
land of promise. • 

The duty of suitably commemorating the great 
events of a nation's history ought not to be neg- 
lected by the Christian patriot. And as I have 
thought that the ninetieth anniversary of that battle 
whose echoes then rang around the civilized world, 
— fought upon an eminence within a stone's throw 
of our church-edifice, distinguished by a historic 
shaft, whose foundations were built into the soil 
that so freely drank the blood of our fathers, and 
beneath whose friendly shadow our children play, — 
ought not to pass without some proper religious 
recognition, I have selected this as the theme of 
the present discourse. 

It is true, indeed, that in an important sense this 
anniversary is national and not local. We cannot, 
if we would, appropriate to ourselves the honor of 
that early conflict. If the nation was rocked into 
existence in Faneuil Hall, these rivers and these 
surrounding hills first echoed to the voice of her 
struggling life. Defeated on yonder height, she 
retreated to other fields, where she was finally 
victorious. It was not merely a few citizens of 
Cambridge and Charlestown and other neighbor- 
ing places, who, on June 16th, 1775, paraded at 



sunset on the University common, and after the 
prayer of President Langdon, repaired, with arms 
and entrenching tools, to Charlestown heights. It 
was a new nation making her first real though 
scarcely conscious stand for the right of self-gov- 
ernment, — of self-existence. That eminence was then 
consecrated as a nation's altar, and Warren and his 
fellow-patriots fell there as a nation's sacrifice. 

And yet, it would be unpardonable in the inhab- 
itants of this city, if they did not cherish a local 
nride in this anniversary, and the event which it 
commemorates. That soil, consecrated by the first 
considerable conflict for national independence, is 
within our city limits. Up tlfet very hill, where in 
winter the school-boy coasts, the haughty Briton, 
twice led his well-trained troops, only to see them 
swept back in confusion beneath the reserved and 
steady fire of yeoman muskets. These very heav- 
ens reflected back the light of the five hundred 
burning dwellings of Charlestown. We live upon 
this historic groimd ; and God forbid that we 
should ever ignore or misprize the sacred associa- 
tions which cluster around us. God forbid that even 
the stirring and wonderful events of the last few 
years should displace our recollections of earlier 
patriotism, of earher sacrifices, of earlier achieve- 
ments. Our national history is one history ; and 
though later clusters of glorified ones are intro- 
duced into the country's galaxy, yet the fixed stars, 
which have so long and so benignantly shone there, 



8 



can never lose their lustre. Though Ellsworth and' 
Lincoln are in the nearer heavens, in the more 
remote, their position eternally secure, are Warren 
and Washington. 

The question has frequently been agitated, whether 
the expenditure which has been lavished upon 
monuments and statues is not an unreasonable and 
needless one. To my own mind, this is much like 
the question asked by one Judas Iscariot, when a 
certain woman anointed the Saviour's head with 
"ointment of spikenard, very precious:" "Why was 
this waste ? For it might have been sold for more 
than three hundred pence and given to the poor." 
We are creatures of* sentiment, as well as utility. 
There is a time when lavish expenditure is no 
waste, and but a worthy tribute of affection and 
reverence; when the fragments of the alabaster-box 
speak more eloquently than words : " Let her 
alone ; why trouble ye her ? She hath wrought a 
good work on me. She is come beforehand to 
anoint my body for the burying." 

There were, doubtless, men of the last genera- 
tion, who severely commented on the folly of such 
a stupendous Structure of stone as now crowns the 
summit of yonder hill. They would have argued, 
" Let these granite blocks repose in their native bed 
at Quincy. Spare all these painful toils: blasting 
and hewing, freighting and erecting. Give your one 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to some benev- 
olent enterprise. The fame of Bunker Hill is se- 



9 



cure^ "Warren is already immortal." The fallacy of 
this censure consists in this : thajt there is a time 
when treasure should be expended, not only with no 
reference to utility, but with entire disregard of it; 
should be expended simply, and solely for purposes 
of sentiment, — ^*to commemorate some great achieve- 
ment, to transmit some distinguished name. The 
twelve stones at Gilgal were placed there purposely 
to provoke the inquiry, "What mean ye by these 
• stones ? ". The stones were to have a language of their 
own; they were to stand solitary by this pathway 
of empire, while they discoursed of the past. 

Men say to-day, "Put up no monuments. Build a 
hospital or a college." Hospitals and colleges are 
good things, and not to be spoken against; and 
so also are monuments. There are men in the 
world whose turn of mind is so utilitarian ' that they 
would convert Bunker Hill Monument itself into an 
observatory, a windmill, or a lighthouse, rather than 
leave it to speak its own language of grandeur. It 
stands there to commemorate, not to be used ; or, 
rather, to commemorate is its use. It stands 
there to speak of that midnight toil with pick- 
axe and spade, within hearing of the "AU's well!" 
of British sentinels on Copp's Hill and men-of-war 
in the harbor. It stands there to speak of the 
hot and bloody work on the morrow. And to 
employ it for any other purpose .would be desecra- 
tion. . ■ 

When we consider the results, immediate and more 



10 



remote, of that struggle, June 17th, 1775, — when we 
remember how freely our fathers then laid down 
their lives for us their children, — we may well ask, 
if any amount of expense, for the sole purpose of 
commemorating and transmitting, to posterity the 
record of their . achievements, can be regarded as 
ivastc? Should not the only language of that ma- 
jestic structm^e be, not beauty, not utility, but 
commemoration? The sturdy and unadorned mas- 
siveness of that pile of gray stone, towering with 
its simple story of New England heroism toward 
the heavens till almost lost in their clouds, and so 
built into the solid earth that it can rock only 
with her own rockings, — this is an appropriate 
monument to their memory. Like it, they stood 
there on that June mid-day, in their unadorned 
grandeur, springing forth from their simple homes, 
a band of patriots unconauered and unconquerable. 
Among the arguments m favor of such memo- 
rials as monuments and anniversaries is the con- 
sideration that they cultivate the feeling of na- 
tionality. " These stones shall be a memorial unto 
the children of Israel forever." They would be a 
memorial to all' spectators; but especially to the 
children of Israel, because they commemorated an 
event so distinguished in the history of their fa- 
thers. One method, by which Jehovah made the 
Hebrew nation one and indivisible in its interests as 
a theocracy, was to bind it together by its mem- 
ories. "I am the Lord thy God, which brought 



11 



thee up out of the land of Egypt, and out of 
the house of bondage." "Brought thee!" not thine 
ancestors, but thee, a nation I Thou, a nation, walkedst 
through the Bed Sea, between those trembling walls, 
which waited only for the chariots of thy foes. 
Thou wast led through the forty years' wandering 
in the wilderness. 

New England has been accustomed to make more 
of the early history qf her ancestors than any 
other portion of the nation. And, as a consequence, 
the sentiment of nationality has been stronger with 
her than with any other section of the country. 
She felt that this nation was moored to Plymouth 
Eock, and built under the brow of Bunker Hill ; 
and that to allow it to be disintegrated was to de- 
stroy the work of the fathers ; that its rapid growth 
and power were in answer to their prayers; and 
that to put a stop to this growth and power by 
violence and bloodshed was to defeat the prophetic 
instincts of their faith. The newer portions of the 
country had not our consecrated memories; the 
Southern portion were false to theirs. The New 
Englander has been taught to feel that the men 
who came wafted across wintry seas in the May- 
flower, and who stood shoulder to shoulder upon 
the crest of Bunker Hill, were one and the same 
with himself; and when asked whether ,he would 
betray and parcel out any of that country, which 
they called their own, to a hostile type of civil- 
ization, or rather to a refined barbarism, — to the 



12 



political high-priests of the rebellion, — his reply was 
an indignant and persistent negative. This was dis- 
loyalty to the fathers, it was treason to the very 
life of the nation. 

This deficiency in the historic, which must neces- 
sarily attach to so young a nation as our own, 
the four years' conflict, which has just triumphantly 
closed, has forever supplied. Every battle fought, 
whether successful or unsuacessful, whether by land 
or by sea; every hero lost, whether officer or pri- 
vate, has deepened the feeling of nationality. The 
men who through such vicissitudes and alternations 
have yielded to the inspiration of the same leaders 
and followed the fortunes of the same flag, the 
dust of whose associates is mingled together on so 
many a hallowed field, are henceforth knit more 
closely together in the sacred oneness of national 
life. As the cold bars of iron, which the workman 
would unite, cannot be made one without the hot 
blast of the furnace and the heavy blows of the 
hammer, so the great Being, who shapes national 
character and destiny, first heated us in this fur- 
nace, and then welded us so indissolubly together 
that seam or rift is henceforth impossible. East ot 
West, North or regenerated South, we are to have 
a national interest paramount to all sectional ones. 

We had been scattering our teeming population 
over • vast territories. Each Congress almost had 
christened a new State. Every influence was cen- 
trifugal. Our population was growing more and 



13 

more heterogeneous. For four long years, God 
breathed upon us with his hot breath, and let his 
ponderous blows descend ; and we are one, as never 
before. He has consecrated battle-fields all over the 
land. And just as the blood of martyrs is the seed 
of the church, so the blood of patriots is the 
seed of nationality. We begin to make truthful 
agam our motto : out of many, one ; unity m di- 
versity ; but unity eternally sacred and supreme ! 
Who can stand at Gettysburg, that gateway, back 
through which the rebel Jiosts were sullenly with- 
drawn, discomfited, but not destroyed, — that .prom- 
ontory, against which almost for the first time 
in the East, the rebel floods were dashed in 
vain, — that resting-place, where thousands of brave 
hearts, of friends and foes, are bivouacked until the 
resurrection morn ; who can walk the streets of 
long-beleaguered Vicksburg or Richmond ; who can 
view the scenes where our gall^t seamen have 
rained their storms of shot and shell into the for- 
tifications of the foe ; who can stand by the grave 
of that man of the people from Illinois, — without 
feeling that all these achievements and memories 
and associations are new bonds of national life ? 
Artifice could not make the nation one, White- 
haired eloquence, uttered with fervor apostolic, could 
not make it one. It had grown beyond the power 
of every external appliance. Some new element 
needed to be infused into its very life. And this 
could be done only by national suffering. And let 



14 

us remember that into this national life God's 
providence" has introduced not the white man alone, 
but the black man also. Henceforth, by all that 
he has patiently and subhmely endured, by all 
that he has heroically done, the negro is an inte- 
gral part of the nation. He should have his monu- 
ment at Fort Wagner and Fort Pillow. 

In the second place, these monuments and memo- 
rials keep alive a nation's sense of indebtedness to 
her ancestors. Ingratitude is the great sin of the 
living present. Obligations to the past are too fre- 
quently forgotten. This, too, is a peculiar sin of Amer- 
icans. There are, doubtless, thousands, and perhaps 
tens of thousands, of the dwellers in yonder crowded 
city, who have never walked within the precincts of 
that memorable enclosure where the gallant and gifted, 
the heroic, Warren fell. And when they look out 
from their windows, they hardly discern the dif- 
ference between^this gray shaft and the many red 
ones which feed the flames of the manufacturer 
and lade the atmosphere with their dusky volumes 
of smoke. The tendency of the men of any gen- 
eration is to live for themselves. But the patriot 
lives only for the future. 

Death was the least fear of Warren and Prescott 
and their associates. They might have been called 
to face death upon the scaffold. And the battle 
of Bunker Hill converted what might have been 
a suppressed riot, with the ringleaders executed, 
into a revolution. But even the possible death of 



a felon could not deter them from their generous 
undertaking. They were willing to forfeit evei^ 
blessing which they possessed or hoped, if they 
could secure an inheritance of freedom for their 
posterity. Those fifteen himdred men, whom Pres- 
cott that day commanded, what cared they for a 
petty tax on tea? It was not the tax, it was the 
principle, which they resisted. " Olsta principiis !'' was 
their motto. They knew that if they did not re- 
sist the beginnings of this injustice, it would fall 
more and more heavily upon their children after 
them. This great nation submits to taxation to-day 
with the utmost grace; deals out taxes, direct and 
indirect, without a murmur. Had the principle been 
just, she would have done so then. Infinitely more 
did she sufier, in the seven years' struggle which 
succeeded, than she could have suffered from the 
most tyrannical taxation. And it is because our 
ancestors so wisely forecasted the future, and sacri- 
ficed everything for it, that we owe them so much. 
They lived for posterity. They died for posterity. 
The husbands and fathers and sons, who went down 
to their graves during the war of the Eevolution, 
died a vicarious death; died a death of substitu- 
tion; died for us; died that they might make us 
and our children, in civil blessings, their heirs and 
assigns forever. 

It is this faith in a great cause, it is this ad- 
herence to it, through suffering and sacrifice, that 
ennobles men aiid renders them worthy, of rever- 



16 



ence. The men who labored during the hours of 
dlirkness on that sixteenth night of June, and fought 
beneath the hot sun of the seventeenth, were men 
who believed in God and the right; and therefore 
they labored and fought. That engagement was no 
freak of passion. They had consulted the oracles 
of the future. This particular battle might go 
against them. It did go against them. But they 
were willing to give the cause the baptism of their 
blood. They believed it could not fail. Throwing 
out of the scale this question of right and God, 
the Southern States, in their recent rebellion, were 
more likely to succeed than the thirteen Colonies. 
Nothing but faith in God and the right sustained 
us. Nothing but faith in God and the right sus- 
tained our fathers. They believed, and therefore they 
laid down their lives; and therefore they deserve 
to be honored by their children. 

The fathers of this nation were nien who have 
unprecedented claims to our reverence. If there has 
ever been any heroism since the world was made, I 
believe that theirs was the purest and noblest. If 
there ever were men who understood the fundamental 
principles of civil and religious liberty, the design and 
powers of a government, I believe that they were the 
men. We may prate about their nasals and their big- 
otry. Doubtless, their hats and coats zvere peculiar. 
They had some few prejudices, which their pert and 
superficial descendants are without. But, I believe that 
their God and ours severely condemns the irreverence 



17 



with which their memory has been treated by some 
of their children. If we have ever succeeded in build- 
ing any living stones into the temple of church or 
state, it is only upon their foundation. They gave us 
the sublime first principles. The men of Plymouth 
Eock and Bunker Hill are the men to whom, under 
God, we are indebted for all that we have been and 
are; for all that we hope to be in the future. And 
if it is a sin and a crime for children to turn away 
in ingratitude from their aged parents, — to appropri- 
ate all the benefits of their early self-denial and strug- 
gles, and leave them to an old age of penury and 
solitude, — to be impatient at their old-fashioned ways 
and ridicule their peculiarities; are irreverence and 
ingratitude toward the fathers of the Kepubhc no sin 
and crime ? Is not that Jehovah, who was willing to 
be regarded their friend, and under whose auspices 
they inaugurated and established this great empire of 
freedom, insulted and repudiated when we derogate 
or detract from them and their work? Just as in 
our more recent national history, we cannot read the 
achievements of our ancestors, without finding God in 
them! And it is this very characteristic recognition 
of God which modern politicians and statesmen so- 
called have designated a contemptible cant, — as certain 
political writers in this country contemptuously desig- 
nated President Lincoln's second Inaugural, so rever- 
ent and humble and Puritanic as it is. 

In the third place, these national monuments and 
memorials keep alive and freshen our obligations to 



18 



the future. The present has a twofold indebtedness. 
It is indebted to the Past. It is indebted also to the 
Future. And the measure of its indebtedness to the 
Past is the measure of its indebtedness to the Fu- 
ture. Because of the seven years' battles of the Rev- 
olution, we owed to our children the four years' 
struggle through which we have just passed. The 
benefits which we received from our fathers, we were 
under the most solemn obligations to transmit to our 
children. And stupendous as has been the recent 
expense in life and treasure, we have paid for our 
free institutions no more than we owed to our fathers, 
— than we owed to our children. "When, on these an- 
niversaries, we hear the booming of cannon and the 
sonorous ringing of bells, at sunrise, mid-day, and sun- 
set ; when we stand by monuments erected to the mem- 
ory of men or events; when we look up to God in 
gratitude for his interpositions in time past, — we are to 
remember that the future can be secured only by emu- 
lating the spirit of our fathers ! There can be no 
inheritance of blessings, without the inheritance of 
corresponding responsibilities. God has appointed us 
the custodians of this vast territory, with all its inter- 
ests, material, civil, moral, and religious. We cannot 
occupy, unless we guard. 

A waste of waters and of winter, uncertain seas, 
uncertain shores beyond, thus it was when our ances- 
tors put forth from Delft Haven. A bloody struggle, 
exile, and death were before them, June 17, 1775. And 
yet they did not falter, they did not hesitate. Thus 



19 



walked they by faith, and not by sight. And thus — 
let us say it humbly, giving God all the praise — have 
we of this generation passed through the great crisis 
of our time, — through a land of deserts and of pits, 
through a land of drought and the shadow of death! 
And victory has only increased our responsibilities. 
If we had failed, we should have withdrawn to our 
limited territory, a homogeneous nation, hastening to 
cover up our shame and disappointment and sorrow in 
a more intense search for material prosperity. But 
we have not failed. God has taken off the incubus 
that weighed us down, and calls us to awake from 
our lethargy to a new destiny. He has wiped out the 
blot that was upon our escutcheon, and calls upon us 
to unfurl it again over the whole country, and let it 
flap its pure folds in the ears of tyrants and the op- 
pressed the world over. But he calls upon us to enter 
upon this new Future, which he has rendered possible 
for us, — nay, which he has most solemnly covenanted 
and reaf&rmed to us, by all the marvels of the four 
years past, — in the spirit of implicit trust in himself 
which characterized • our ancestors. 

There are moral battles to be fought, the results of 
which shall equal in grandeur the material ones, which 
our soldiers and seamen have lately achieved. It seems 
a great work, to give this land a pure and mighty 
gospel, as we have now redeemed it to the principles 
of universal freedom ; to lift up the cross of Christ, as 
we have lifted up the banner of the republic. The 
great moral wastes, with which the land is covered, — 



20 



can these be reclaimed, and made to blossom, as a 
garden ? Can the prairie-bloom of Protestantism be 
expected in those portions of the land, where, as they 
sweep westward, tides of foreign emigration are leav- 
ing their dehris, socially and religiously hostile to our 
civilization? Can the South, that Egyptian prison- 
house, whose doors have been thrown back by " Him 
that openeth, and no man shutteth ; and shutteth, and 
no man openeth," and which shall no more " grate harsh 
discord" upon the ears of the oppressed, — can this 
South be reorganized, and reconstructed into a palace 
of civil and religious freedom, in whose symmetry and 
beauty the whole earth shall rejoice ? Can New Eng- 
land, Puritan New England, be saved from the scepti- 
cism and rationalism and infidelity of some of her own 
institutions of learning, and the princely minds that 
preside and are furnished there ? These are the ques- 
tions which have taken the place of the great military 
questions of the day. These are the movements which 
should excite the attention, and inspire the prayers 
and exertions of the people of God throughout the 
land. 

And it is within the shadow of yonder hill of sacri- 
fice, where, as the patriarch upon Mount Moriah, " our 
fathers saw our day and were glad," and warmed 
and quickened by the associations which attach to 
yonder eloquent granite shaft, that these questions 
and movements ought to be considered. We can 
conquer this land for our Master, if we undertake it 
in the spirit of our fathers ; if we are willing to take 



21 



our institutions with our household goods into emi- 
grant-wagons, and follow the star of empire, westward 
to the Pacific, and southward to the Gulf These rude 
vehicles are the Mayflowers of more modern days. 
If by no other method, the South can be reorganized, 
the West can be saved from Eomanism and infidelity, 
as Kansas was saved to freedom. The heroism of the 
Revolution gave us a country. The heroism of our 
own times has redeemed and perpetuated it. We 
need the same heroism in the Christian Church. We 
need men who will stand in the imminent deadly 
breach, who will lead a forlorn hope, who will con- 
tend for the faith once delivered to the saints with 
the persistency and skill of those heroes, who have 
just returned victorious from the field. The same 
qualities are requisite for moral achievements as for 
military. 

Error is always aggressive. While we sleep, the 
enemy is sowing tares. So it was in our struggle 
with the system of oppression ; so it is and will be in 
our struggles to evangelize this nation and give it to 
our Master as his inheritance. The country needs a 
spiritual renovation as marked and triumphant as the 
political one now in successful progress. And, dark 
and forbidding as is the prospect, full of obstacles as is 
the way, if we have the faith with which our fathers 
wrested the country from the grasp of tyranny, with 
which our brothers have redeemed it to freedom, the 
thing will be done. It will cost us money, prayers, 
exertions, and that eternal vigilance which is no less 
the price of religious liberty than civil. 



22 



By his providence, God seems to say to us to-day, 
" ye sous of the men, whose muskets swept down 
the flower of British arrogance on Bunker Hill ! ye 
kindred of the men who have been stayed neither 
by heat nor cold, neither by barbarities in the field 
or the prison-house, during the recent struggle with 
the South ! — catch your inspiration, in the work of sav- 
ing this nation for Christ, from the heroism of your 
brothers and sires ! The unseen forces of Heaven are 
ranged upon your side. Greater is He that is for 
you, than any that can rise up against you. If you 
are true to your Leader, he will surely conduct you 
to victory." 

Could we witness our young men rallying around 
the Cross of Christ, as they have rallied around the 
flag of their native land; would fathers and mothers 
point their children to the work of the Christian 
minister or missionary, rather than to positions of 
worldly ease and afiluence ; would the church pour 
out of her treasures, as our heroes have poured out 
of their blood; would she undertake a systematic and 
organized eflbrt to carry the triumphs of grace into 
every community, into every household and heart, — 
then we should have spiritual jubilees corresponding 
to those civil ones which have lately filled the land 
with rejoicing. Stronghold after stronghold would fall, 
army after army would be compelled to surrender, 
leader after leader would come back to his allegiance, 
until not a standard of rebellion was left uplifted in 
all the land. Shall we not seek that baptism of faith, 



23 



which will prepare us for such a consummation ? God 
forbid that these memorials of sacrifice and achieve- 
ment for civil freedom shall ever be gazed upon by 
our children, with the reflection, that had the spirit- 
ual heroism of their fathers been equal to that other 
heroism which filled the land with monuments of 
military valor, their religious liberties never had been 
forfeited and lost. God forbid that when our chil- 
dren's children shall inquire of their fathers, " What 
mean ye by these stones ? " there shall be occasion 
for any feehng of shame in the response. For if we 
are faithful to the principles of the gospel of Christ, 
if we make our people an enlightened Christian peo- 
ple, then our civil liberties can never be lost; the 
future will be as secure and as honorable as the 
past. 



F»-71 








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